Cate of the Lost Colony - Lisa Klein [79]
At this I stifled a laugh, drawing suspicious looks. Well, if people were going to stare at me, they might as well hear me.
“Mark instead what nonsense Master Chapman speaks, ” I said. “How could Vickers or anyone have planned a rendezvous with Spain a year ago, not knowing the circumstances in which we would find ourselves now?”
Some looked away abashed, while a few nodded. Bailey and his allies regarded me with hostility.
“Moreover, being a papist does not make a traitor of a man—or a woman,” I added in Betty’s defense.
“But what if they are guilty?” someone shouted.
“Now is the time to find out,” Bailey said, heading for the armory where Betty and her brother were being held.
Silently I berated myself for speaking out. Why could I not learn to hold my tongue? Now Betty would be judged by the four assistants who remained: Bailey, two lazy gentlemen who did his bidding, and Ananias.
Everyone crowded into the armory as Betty and her brother were brought forward. Betty’s eyes were wide with dread and her lips moved in prayer. Bailey questioned her first, perhaps thinking she would confess easily. But she shook her head when asked to reveal the details of her husband’s plot. Bailey held up a pair of iron pliers. Still she confessed nothing. He placed her fingers in the pliers and pressed. She gritted her teeth, and he pressed harder. I saw Ananias cringe. I stared at Betty’s brother, willing him to confess in her stead, but his eyes were tightly closed. There was a crack of bone and Betty screamed the names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Jane Pierce, far gone with Bailey’s child, fainted. Alice and I carried her out and laid her on a bench. My own stomach was churning. I wished with all my being that Roger Bailey would be struck dead.
Georgie Howe stood by the door of the armory, rocking back and forth, fear in his eyes.
“Papa’s in the ground. Georgie is cold,” he said, although there was sweat on his forehead.
“Cate is cold, too, Georgie,” I said.
After Roger Bailey broke three of Betty’s fingers, her brother shouted out what everyone waited to hear: that he and Ambrose had conspired with Fernandes to betray the location of Fort Ralegh to the Spanish. I was certain he lied, except in swearing that Betty was innocent. Still, Bailey decreed that they would be taken to the mainland, rowed upriver in the shallop, and left to fend for themselves. It was a sentence of death, more cruel even than hanging. The punishment stunned everyone, and Bailey had to carry it out himself to ensure that it was done.
I simmered with rage against Bailey and all the assistants. A sense of my own guilt and helplessness plagued me. Every one of us, I felt, had been complicit in making the Vickers family scapegoats for our fears. The only innocent one was little Virginia, who smelled of milk and sweetness, her happy smile belying the suffering all around her.
My desire to escape the company of the other colonists made me decide to go to Dasemunkepeuc on that fateful day. Graham, as usual, accompanied me. Alice left her baby with Eleanor and joined us, saying she was weary of her husband’s talk of conspiracies. Jane Pierce was also glad to come. She had confessed to me she was afraid of Roger Bailey.
“He has called me a whore and denied the child is his,” she said, pulling up her sleeves to show me the bruises on her arms.
“You must not marry him,” I said. “All your days will be miserable.”
“But it would make me an outcast to have no father for my baby,” she said, touching her belly.
“I will be your friend,” I said, “if you promise not to be such a gossip.” Once she had asked me if I had a lover at the Indians’ village, to which I had responded with a cold